M1 GPU is extremely slow, how can I enable CPU to train my NNs?

Hi everyone,

I found that the performance of GPU is not good as I expected (as slow as a turtle), I wanna switch from GPU to CPU. but mlcompute module cannot be found, so wired.

The same code ran on colab and my computer (jupyter lab) take 156s vs 40 minutes per epoch, respectively.

I only used a small dataset (a few thousands of data points), and each epoch only have 20 baches.

I am so disappointing and it seems like the "powerful" GPU is a joke.

I am using 12.0.1 macOS and the version of tensorflow-macos is 2.6.0

Can anyone tell me why this happens?

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dkjdjdfdskln
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It seems like the small batch size will reduce the performance of GPU https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/685623 so I increased the batch size from 256 to 1024, which reduced the running time from 40 minutes to 10 minutes per epoch. However, again, one epoch only takes around 2 minutes with CPU.

I am so confused now, it seems like I need to increase the batch size from 1024 to 1024 * 5 so that the running time will be reduced to 2 minutes per epoch.....

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dkjdjdfdskln
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Update: I found M1 chip is extremely slow on LSTM compared with CNN.

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dkjdjdfdskln
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Update: I ran exactly the same LSTM code on Macbook Pro M1 Pro and Macbook Pro 2017, It turns out M1 Pro costs 6 hrs for one epoch, and 2017 model only needs 158s.

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dkjdjdfdskln
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I use pip uninstall tensorflow-metal and I get CPU acceleration again!

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zorchp
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An alternative to uninstalling tensorflow-metal is to disable GPU usage. This is a copy-paste from my other post...

To disable the GPU completely on the M1 use tf.config.experimental.set_visible_devices([], 'GPU'). To disable the GPU for certain operations, use:

with tf.device('/cpu:0'):
    # tf calls here
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cyrusomega
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  • How do you check whether you are actually working on CPU then?

    I did:

    with tf.device('/cpu:0'): print(tf.config.list_physical_devices('GPU'))

    and got the output: [PhysicalDevice(name='/physical_device:GPU:0', device_type='GPU')]

    —
    mowi-mb
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